Yeah, it cuts both ways. The fact that nothing happened doesn't mean that the preventative worked. But the fact that nothing happened also doesn't mean that the preventative wasn't needed. It's important to understand why the reasoning is flawed, and not just that it is flawed, or else you wind up falling into different flawed reasoning.
E.g., the reason people believe the stimulus worked is not that things might have been worse without it, but rather that things _are_ demonstrably worse in places where the government chose austerity instead of stimulus. So, regarding the Patriot act, can you come up with a similar comparison? It's pretty clear that loans are the wrong way to help people afford college, but nobody seems to have the testicular fortitude to replace them with grants.
We have a built-in bias against successful disaster planning: since the planning was successful, the disaster didn't happen, and hence to the average observer, it looks like there wouldn't have been a disaster. The reasoning is flawed, of course, but apparently very hard to resist. This is why governments are only ever harmful—if they do any good, things would have gone well anyway, so they didn't need to spend all that money and go to all that effort. This cognitive flaw is why people who do diving catches are respected, and people who plan for the future and avoid problems are ignored, and why blithering idiots keep getting control of the reins and breaking things.
If she's asking for your personal details, then yeah, you have some cause for concern. But I doubt that's what she's asking for. TFA suggests that she wants to know where her work is popular, so that she can plan where to have her next concert, and target publicity effectively. Seems like a reasonable idea to me, although she may be disappointed to find that there is no locality to the data, and that her fans are actually evenly distributed across some large area.
Because the guys who do well on the athletic field are better at punching people they don't like than the guys from the chess club. At least, that's how it was when I was in school.
For me, sports were not in any sense easy. I never played any kind of eye-hand coordination games or running games with my parents outside of school, so I sucked at them, and had no idea that I only sucked because I hadn't practiced. The "smart kid who plays sports" dodge is great if you can pull it off, but it's not just a matter of choice—you have to be fortunate enough to be able to actually pull it off, or it's just another reason to get punched.
The really sad thing about all this advice is that kids, whether they are jocks or geeks, are dumb shits when it comes to understanding things social. It takes years of practice to get good at it. You can fake it 'til you make it if you're at the top of the heap, but the bottom line is that I, and probably most of the kids I knew in school, even the popular kids, could _really_ have used some instruction on how to behave well in social interactions with our peers. Unfortunately, I never got any of that, and neither did they, so I learned it by trial and error over the next thirty years or so. I don't know how it worked out for them.
They do mesh networking, and remote management. So you buy a bunch of their boxes, hang them all over the place, hardwire them to your network where you can, rely on the mesh where you can't hardwire them. They form a mesh, which you manage from a web site Meraki runs. It's not a bad system for running a wifi infrastructure, if you don't mind the monthly fees and the somewhat underpowered routers.
Lamar Smith is a Congressman, not a senator. Anyway, my point was that this isn't an issue that's heavy in either party's platform, so there's a lot of potential for movement in the primaries.
RIght. So you'll produce a copyrighted work for $K. There is some value N such that you will not bother to produce the work for $NK. There is some value X such that, if you are paid $XK, you will postpone working on your next work, because you don't need the money. So in fact the original poster is right—the basis for the debate has to be whether the copyright law promotes science and the useful arts. If it is too weak, it won't. If it is too strong, it likewise won't. It has to be Just Right...
Of course, that's a gross oversimplification, since the strength of copyright laws isn't what determines the multiplier of K. But hopefully it gets the point across...
The majority of the current batch might not, but it's by no means the case that this is a Republican vs. Democrat issue. Lamar Smith, who sponsored SOPA, is a Republican in a gerrymandered district. Most of the people who took down SOPA in committee were Democrats. Pat Leahy, a Democrat, sponsored PIPA, SOPA's sister legislation in the Senate.
Point being, if this is an important issue to you, pay attention to which party is likely to win in your district, and register for that party and vote in the primary. Try to get one of the candidates in the primary to take positions in favor of some of the ideas mentioned in TFA. Work to get that candidate to win the primary.
Seriously, this is that rare issue where neither party has a strong position for or against, so it's entirely possible to get enough people to vote in favor of changing the law to be less in favor of copyright holders. But you have to actually work at it—it's not enough to grouse about it on Slashdot.
Actually, the usual reason for a WiFi network to be slow is not a lack of QoS-based routing, but rather bufferbloat, which is what happens when transmit queue buffers in a router or bridge are not tuned to the carrying capacity of the transport. This results in packets being transmitted late, and hence their responses coming late, which fools the TCP congestion control algorithm and causes it to stutter. The result is that although there is sufficient bandwidth on the link, people don't get to use it, because most of the bandwidth is lost either to timeouts or retransmissions.
It's surprising that NCSU has this weird technique that they've no doubt patented; you could just download a copy of CeroWRT. The linux kernel was patched a while back to support CertWRT's anti-bufferbloat algorithm, but unfortunately right now you also have to apply custom configuration to the router to tune the buffer size to the capacity of your link.
This is putting the cart before the horse. Make something that runs well on _existing_ tablets. _Then_ talk about building a special tablet to run it on. There are a lot of fine candidates out there—there's no reason to waste effort building another one that will deliver half the performance at the same price. A Nexus 7 or a Nexus 10 would be a great platform for prototyping this.
Having said that, I completely agree with your point about KDE. In addition to being a memory hog, it's hopelessly complicated and presents an impossible learning curve to anyone who just wants to figure out why dumped core. It might as well be closed source, for all the good that having the source does.
The UC system worked pretty well for a long time, until California went bankrupt. You are certainly right that no system can be perfect, but it's not the case that these pressures are entirely bad. If they motivate the hiring of more teachers and the acceptance of more good students, then that's a good thing. People who are actually in need of the schools are a very small constituency—they do not have the power, on their own, to force the system to do what they want. If the people of the state want the schools to be good, they can make it stick.
The problem is that right now, the people of the state just want to cut costs, and don't care if the young adults of their state get a good education. This is a false economy that they will pay for in their retirement, when there is nobody qualified to take care of them.
So basically he's proposing that instead of using a carefully insulated browser, we install code on our computers provided by banks that will never be updated, and will be full of unpatched bugs. And this will make our machines more secure. Are we sure this guy is a white hat?
What you are describing is unbridled free market economics, not economics. It's a common misconception that unbridled free market economics is the only kind there is, but this is not actually the case. What is being described in TFA is an incentive-based economic system, where government decides which industries are most likely to need new workers in ten years, and provides incentives for students to learn the skills they need to get jobs in those industries.
I hate to say it, but I think that a better plan would be to continue with the current system, where we don't ask the government to predict the future, and instead let students decide what to do, but make sure that whatever decision they make doesn't lock them into a career, as we currently do, by maximizing their post-college debt. The best thing to do, IOW, is to minimize the cost of making a mistake. If you get a degree in biochem, and later realize that there are far too many people with those degrees, you ought to be able to spend another couple of years in school, building on your first degree, to get a second one that's more useful.
The way it works right now, unless you have substantial financial resources, if you blow it and choose the wrong career track, you wind up waiting tables to pay off your giant student loans.
Oversimplification. You can have low tuition, limited acceptance and high entry requirements, and the quality of new students will rise, because tuition will no longer be the reason why a poor but talented student doesn't take a slot, which then becomes available for a lower quality but wealthier student. Or you can have high tuition, low entry requirements, and the quality of students will rise, because it will be determined by how much they can pay, not by their ability.
Actually, I'm having trouble thinking of a scenario where taking tuition away as an obstacle to getting an education reduces the quality of education. You have some 'splaining to do, Anonymous Coward.
This isn't a network. It's a device, and they have physical custody of it. If there is code that needs to run and can do the security validation, they'd have to hack the code. If there is in fact a yes/no signal, which is a lot more likely than you say, since this is a retrofit, then it would be easy for a brave person who isn't afraid to die to debug. Harder for a brave person who is afraid to die, but not impossible. The problem is that the stinger missile is mostly hardware; making it secure would be very hard. I guess they could swap out the 1980's-era CPU for something more modern, but they'd have to completely rewrite all the code. Meanwhile, an Arduino could probably run the thing if you were willing to take some risks.
I'm sorry, but there is no magic in computer security. Unless they are willing to make the missile blow up if it detects tampering, whatever DRM they put into it _will_ get hacked around one way or another.
This sounds great until you consider how innovative people in the middle east have been with weaponry during the recent wars there. I'm skeptical that the security on these things would survive the first set of batteries.
So, apparently what was left out was that it was a really hot day, and they were handing out water to people who'd been standing in line for hours. And some jackass decided to make the incredible claim that these people, who had been standing in line for hours, were being asked to sell their vote in exchange for the water. If they cared so little about who they were voting for, why did they stand in line in the hot sun for hours to vote?
The real scandal here is that someone would have to stand in line for hours to vote. What is up with that?
This doesn't solve all the problems. Consider the case of farm workers. I'm sure you wouldn't argue that we can do without them—without them, we would all starve. But much of the work they do is low-skill, meaning that it's easy to hire replacements. As a consequence, wages are pathetically low. The _only_ thing that can have any effect on this is some kind of collective action, either in the form of a formal or informal union, or in the form of minimum wage laws. This same problem exists for many necessary jobs. I don't see how strengthening laws for individuals helps with this, unless you are in fact talking about a serious minimum wage law (not the pathetic cost-of-living increases that have actually been discussed).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it cuts both ways. The fact that nothing happened doesn't mean that the preventative worked. But the fact that nothing happened also doesn't mean that the preventative wasn't needed. It's important to understand why the reasoning is flawed, and not just that it is flawed, or else you wind up falling into different flawed reasoning.
E.g., the reason people believe the stimulus worked is not that things might have been worse without it, but rather that things _are_ demonstrably worse in places where the government chose austerity instead of stimulus. So, regarding the Patriot act, can you come up with a similar comparison? It's pretty clear that loans are the wrong way to help people afford college, but nobody seems to have the testicular fortitude to replace them with grants.
We have a built-in bias against successful disaster planning: since the planning was successful, the disaster didn't happen, and hence to the average observer, it looks like there wouldn't have been a disaster. The reasoning is flawed, of course, but apparently very hard to resist. This is why governments are only ever harmful—if they do any good, things would have gone well anyway, so they didn't need to spend all that money and go to all that effort. This cognitive flaw is why people who do diving catches are respected, and people who plan for the future and avoid problems are ignored, and why blithering idiots keep getting control of the reins and breaking things.
If she's asking for your personal details, then yeah, you have some cause for concern. But I doubt that's what she's asking for. TFA suggests that she wants to know where her work is popular, so that she can plan where to have her next concert, and target publicity effectively. Seems like a reasonable idea to me, although she may be disappointed to find that there is no locality to the data, and that her fans are actually evenly distributed across some large area.
Because the guys who do well on the athletic field are better at punching people they don't like than the guys from the chess club. At least, that's how it was when I was in school.
For me, sports were not in any sense easy. I never played any kind of eye-hand coordination games or running games with my parents outside of school, so I sucked at them, and had no idea that I only sucked because I hadn't practiced. The "smart kid who plays sports" dodge is great if you can pull it off, but it's not just a matter of choice—you have to be fortunate enough to be able to actually pull it off, or it's just another reason to get punched.
The really sad thing about all this advice is that kids, whether they are jocks or geeks, are dumb shits when it comes to understanding things social. It takes years of practice to get good at it. You can fake it 'til you make it if you're at the top of the heap, but the bottom line is that I, and probably most of the kids I knew in school, even the popular kids, could _really_ have used some instruction on how to behave well in social interactions with our peers. Unfortunately, I never got any of that, and neither did they, so I learned it by trial and error over the next thirty years or so. I don't know how it worked out for them.
They do mesh networking, and remote management. So you buy a bunch of their boxes, hang them all over the place, hardwire them to your network where you can, rely on the mesh where you can't hardwire them. They form a mesh, which you manage from a web site Meraki runs. It's not a bad system for running a wifi infrastructure, if you don't mind the monthly fees and the somewhat underpowered routers.
Arguably more useful, since you don't have to dual-boot!
But rewriting your whole system in Ruby is hugely productive! Look at the number of new lines of code!
Seriously, the managing director of a lab at SAP in India? They were really scraping at the bottom of the barrel here. Seems like link bait to me.
Lamar Smith is a Congressman, not a senator. Anyway, my point was that this isn't an issue that's heavy in either party's platform, so there's a lot of potential for movement in the primaries.
RIght. So you'll produce a copyrighted work for $K. There is some value N such that you will not bother to produce the work for $NK. There is some value X such that, if you are paid $XK, you will postpone working on your next work, because you don't need the money. So in fact the original poster is right—the basis for the debate has to be whether the copyright law promotes science and the useful arts. If it is too weak, it won't. If it is too strong, it likewise won't. It has to be Just Right...
Of course, that's a gross oversimplification, since the strength of copyright laws isn't what determines the multiplier of K. But hopefully it gets the point across...
The majority of the current batch might not, but it's by no means the case that this is a Republican vs. Democrat issue. Lamar Smith, who sponsored SOPA, is a Republican in a gerrymandered district. Most of the people who took down SOPA in committee were Democrats. Pat Leahy, a Democrat, sponsored PIPA, SOPA's sister legislation in the Senate.
Point being, if this is an important issue to you, pay attention to which party is likely to win in your district, and register for that party and vote in the primary. Try to get one of the candidates in the primary to take positions in favor of some of the ideas mentioned in TFA. Work to get that candidate to win the primary.
Seriously, this is that rare issue where neither party has a strong position for or against, so it's entirely possible to get enough people to vote in favor of changing the law to be less in favor of copyright holders. But you have to actually work at it—it's not enough to grouse about it on Slashdot.
Actually, the usual reason for a WiFi network to be slow is not a lack of QoS-based routing, but rather bufferbloat, which is what happens when transmit queue buffers in a router or bridge are not tuned to the carrying capacity of the transport. This results in packets being transmitted late, and hence their responses coming late, which fools the TCP congestion control algorithm and causes it to stutter. The result is that although there is sufficient bandwidth on the link, people don't get to use it, because most of the bandwidth is lost either to timeouts or retransmissions.
It's surprising that NCSU has this weird technique that they've no doubt patented; you could just download a copy of CeroWRT. The linux kernel was patched a while back to support CertWRT's anti-bufferbloat algorithm, but unfortunately right now you also have to apply custom configuration to the router to tune the buffer size to the capacity of your link.
This is putting the cart before the horse. Make something that runs well on _existing_ tablets. _Then_ talk about building a special tablet to run it on. There are a lot of fine candidates out there—there's no reason to waste effort building another one that will deliver half the performance at the same price. A Nexus 7 or a Nexus 10 would be a great platform for prototyping this.
Having said that, I completely agree with your point about KDE. In addition to being a memory hog, it's hopelessly complicated and presents an impossible learning curve to anyone who just wants to figure out why dumped core. It might as well be closed source, for all the good that having the source does.
I hasten to add that it was not the UC system that bankrupted California!
The UC system worked pretty well for a long time, until California went bankrupt. You are certainly right that no system can be perfect, but it's not the case that these pressures are entirely bad. If they motivate the hiring of more teachers and the acceptance of more good students, then that's a good thing. People who are actually in need of the schools are a very small constituency—they do not have the power, on their own, to force the system to do what they want. If the people of the state want the schools to be good, they can make it stick.
The problem is that right now, the people of the state just want to cut costs, and don't care if the young adults of their state get a good education. This is a false economy that they will pay for in their retirement, when there is nobody qualified to take care of them.
Please?
So basically he's proposing that instead of using a carefully insulated browser, we install code on our computers provided by banks that will never be updated, and will be full of unpatched bugs. And this will make our machines more secure. Are we sure this guy is a white hat?
What you are describing is unbridled free market economics, not economics. It's a common misconception that unbridled free market economics is the only kind there is, but this is not actually the case. What is being described in TFA is an incentive-based economic system, where government decides which industries are most likely to need new workers in ten years, and provides incentives for students to learn the skills they need to get jobs in those industries.
I hate to say it, but I think that a better plan would be to continue with the current system, where we don't ask the government to predict the future, and instead let students decide what to do, but make sure that whatever decision they make doesn't lock them into a career, as we currently do, by maximizing their post-college debt. The best thing to do, IOW, is to minimize the cost of making a mistake. If you get a degree in biochem, and later realize that there are far too many people with those degrees, you ought to be able to spend another couple of years in school, building on your first degree, to get a second one that's more useful.
The way it works right now, unless you have substantial financial resources, if you blow it and choose the wrong career track, you wind up waiting tables to pay off your giant student loans.
Oversimplification. You can have low tuition, limited acceptance and high entry requirements, and the quality of new students will rise, because tuition will no longer be the reason why a poor but talented student doesn't take a slot, which then becomes available for a lower quality but wealthier student. Or you can have high tuition, low entry requirements, and the quality of students will rise, because it will be determined by how much they can pay, not by their ability.
Actually, I'm having trouble thinking of a scenario where taking tuition away as an obstacle to getting an education reduces the quality of education. You have some 'splaining to do, Anonymous Coward.
Also supporting picking winners (or at least winning industries). A foolish consistency is, after all, the hobgoblin of small minds...
This isn't a network. It's a device, and they have physical custody of it. If there is code that needs to run and can do the security validation, they'd have to hack the code. If there is in fact a yes/no signal, which is a lot more likely than you say, since this is a retrofit, then it would be easy for a brave person who isn't afraid to die to debug. Harder for a brave person who is afraid to die, but not impossible. The problem is that the stinger missile is mostly hardware; making it secure would be very hard. I guess they could swap out the 1980's-era CPU for something more modern, but they'd have to completely rewrite all the code. Meanwhile, an Arduino could probably run the thing if you were willing to take some risks.
I'm sorry, but there is no magic in computer security. Unless they are willing to make the missile blow up if it detects tampering, whatever DRM they put into it _will_ get hacked around one way or another.
Feh, pounding a nail with a screwdriver. Just figure out which trace has the "enable" signal on it, and tie it to +5.
This sounds great until you consider how innovative people in the middle east have been with weaponry during the recent wars there. I'm skeptical that the security on these things would survive the first set of batteries.
Oh come on, what could possibly go wrong with this clever plan? :)
So, apparently what was left out was that it was a really hot day, and they were handing out water to people who'd been standing in line for hours. And some jackass decided to make the incredible claim that these people, who had been standing in line for hours, were being asked to sell their vote in exchange for the water. If they cared so little about who they were voting for, why did they stand in line in the hot sun for hours to vote?
The real scandal here is that someone would have to stand in line for hours to vote. What is up with that?
This doesn't solve all the problems. Consider the case of farm workers. I'm sure you wouldn't argue that we can do without them—without them, we would all starve. But much of the work they do is low-skill, meaning that it's easy to hire replacements. As a consequence, wages are pathetically low. The _only_ thing that can have any effect on this is some kind of collective action, either in the form of a formal or informal union, or in the form of minimum wage laws. This same problem exists for many necessary jobs. I don't see how strengthening laws for individuals helps with this, unless you are in fact talking about a serious minimum wage law (not the pathetic cost-of-living increases that have actually been discussed).